O God, foraſmuch as without thee we are
not able to pleaſe thee; Mercifully grant,
that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jeſus Chriſt our
Lord. Amen.
Keynote: Taught of God
We are sometimes tempted to resent the fact that without Divine help we cannot rise to the spiritual heights. Perhaps if we had a better understanding of the processes that go on in a soul in a the course of its regeneration - if we had some understanding of spiritual psychology - we should be less inclined to dispute what, when all is said and done, is a bare statement of fact, well known to all who have had experience of the mystic path.
Let us look at the matter in this way. How could we expect a child, untrained, uneducated, to grow up into a cultured man? It is well known that children who are cut off from human intercourse, although of normal intelligence, never develop articulate speech. And so with ourselves, if no higher Light ever shone upon the soul could we, unaided, think out for ourselves the ideal and practice of the spiritual life.
Mortal man had to acquire ideas totally apart from those that come to him through the five physical senses if he is to get any realisation of the spiritual life. Without the divine influence from the Divine mind ever pouring out upon the world, we could form no conception of the nature of God. It is noteworthy that those who try to conceive of God without having had any experience of this Divine influence have met with little success in their self-imposed task. It is not the faculties of the human mind, its reason and its scholarship, that enable us to understand God, but the inner awareness of the Divine influence.
To understand God, we must be taught of God, and no other teacher can do more than help us to clarify the impression thus obtained and arrange our ideas.
[Dion Fortune, Mystical Meditations on the Christian Collects]
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